More about CFL Lighting and INSTEON Home Control

In a previous post it appeared that the Philips Marathon Classic 65 Dimmable Energy Savings Reflector Flood BR30 was a good CFL for use on INSTEON devices. Update, the Philips Marathon Classic 65 Dimmable Energy Savings Reflector Flood BR30 bulb failed a couple weeks ago. After an email and phone call to Philips, they sent a refund check and a mailer to return the bulb. Oddly, the CFL was not even being used on a dimmer of any kind. It was on a standard switch and was used daily in the evenings.

Dimmers were used in this house in the past as a way to save energy. Lamps were operated at about 50% to provide lighting adequate to move around but not waste too much energy. CFL power consumption is so low that dimming is not beneficial for saving energy. Nothing dims like an incandescent either, the CFL dimmed appearance just didn't seem right.

No more dimmable INSTEON controllers will be purchased except in KeyPadLincs. Four SwitchLinc V2 Relays were just installed for fans and fluorescent lighting and future purchases will be SwichLinc Relays for CFL circuits.

Indigo and Module-to-Module Links

Indigo can be used to manage all the INSTEON links in the INSTEON modules, just like in EZSrve. The difference is with Indigo, it works and the log files help with troubleshooting. INSTEON scenes/groups were created and the links added to the KeyPadLinc, RemoteLinc and LampLincs. Now as with the EZSrve, the RemoteLinc, the KeyPadLinc or Indigo can command the scene with active status on the KeyPadLinc LEDs and in Indigo. Operation is instantaneous because all the controllers are sending INSTEON commands directly to the modules.

Indigo Triggers were used to adapt old X10 controllers to operate the INSTEON modules. The triggers were configured to hear the X10 commands and then operate the INSTEON action groups. This control process takes about 1 second.

Looks like custom control web pages will be easy to create using the Indigo RESTful URLs

Indigo vs EZSrve, first impressions

Perceptive Automation's Indigo Home Automation software paired with a Smarthome PowerLinc 2414U USB INSTEON/X10 power line interface is working quite well. Running on an iMac with Leopard OS X 10.5.7, the software is full featured with very good log files that distinguish it from the SimpleHomeNet EZSrve (EZServe). Indigo is a welcome relief after struggling with the EZSrve for almost two years.

UPDATE: June 6, 2009 -- No problems after initial configuration. One nice feature of INSTEON is its module to module communication which adds to its "instant on" behavior. Indigo can be a central server with all control requests processed by it but this takes about 2 seconds to process. Indigo can also be used to build module-to-module links in the INSTEON devices just like the EZSrve. This results in faster operation and provides control capability outside Indigo in case Indigo is not running.

All the timers worked last night. The X10 to INSTEON triggers work so X10 controllers can be used to operate INSTEON modules. Everything is working as it should.

The logging on Indigo is great. It revealed a problem with a wireless INSTEON controller. There seemed to be an endless list of empty link records to unload. The RemoteLinc had to be reset to factory because Indigo couldn't get past the downloading of empty records. Now the RemoteLinc is suspect as being part of the EZSrve issues. The EZSrve has no logging however and so all difficulties are in the blind.

I hope to factory reset all INSTEON modules today to get rid of the EZSrve links and then pursue the module to module links. Perhaps Indigo will store those links even if it won't create the links.

Indigo is really a client server architecture. The client on the MacBook Pro is the same client as on the iMac where the server is running. Screen sharing was used to configure Indigo but it all, except applescript, could have been done from the MacBook Pro.

The Indigo Touch iPhone app is spectacular. Download from the iTunes App Store.

Using the Oregon Scientific RMS300

The Oregon Scientific (OS) RMS300A temperature and humidity instrument has been integrated with MRTG on a Linux system. The Oregon Scientific Windows XP software runs in two parts, data collection and display. The data collection part stores the base and remote unit data in files at C:\Program Files\Oregon Scientific\Weather OS\DATA\TH. The Linux system mounts the shared TH folder with cifs and a PERL script parses the sensors.csv file for input to MRTG. It will be better when the RMS300A can be connected directly to Linux or Apple, but until then this works fine.

As of this post, the OS display software does not display the remote sensor data. OS technical support does not have an answer for the issue. Fortunately the data collection program is collecting both the base and remote data so its not an issue in this implementation.

Looking for Oregon Scientific RMS300 Temperature and Humidity Software

The Oregon Scientific RMS300A Indoor/Outdoor Thermo-Hygrometer with USB and Clock is available for the reasonable price of $50 at Amazon. It comes with Windows XP software and would be a great instrument if Linux or Mac OS X software was available. I am hoping wview will have drivers for it eventually or some other package. If someone knows the interface specifications or has developed Linux or Mac software for it, please leave a comment and let me know.

CentOS Linux sees it like this:

• usb 3-1: new low speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 4
• usb 3-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
• hiddev98: USB HID v1.10 Device [ ] on usb-0000:00:1d.1-1